Scratching at a Solid Surface is a psycho-geographic documentary of failing and irregular orbits. Navigating the 'terrain vague' near my home in Cardiff, I have been photographing an economic landscape, familiar across Britain today. Using a large format camera to document circular journeys around my neighborhood, I have been attempting to map the psychological spaces of my immediate locale. Avoiding urban centers, I circumnavigate peripheries and zones given over to housing estates, retail, industry and leisure parks. Spaces caught between prosperity and abject failure, these photographs depict a locale that has been crushed by the global. The spaces of the banal and everyday are now powerful signifiers of an international crisis of epic proportions.
The landscape, pitted as it is by the obvious signs of economic failure, austerity-measures and social-immobility, is a space where the dreams of success now lay tattered across its surface. If the economic crisis was caused by the fantasies of a few, its affects are now played out in the fears of the majority. The desires of excess have now been replaced by anxieties over the excesses of others. Once activated by the commodity and shiny new corporate surfaces of redevelopment, such desires have now been displaced to the mundane fringes of our urban centres. These are documents of an anxious and melancholic time.
If the traditional notion of ‘neighborhood’ connotes familiarity and belonging, here the neighborhood becomes estranged by the cartographical act of photography itself. The photographer is always alien to the location of the photograph; intruder, outsider. The ‘local’ is a psychological construct that one never quite ‘fits’ within; a feeling that one is never quite at home in one’s own house. Spaces may look the same on a day-to-day basis, they may even seem recognizable or unremarkable, but on closer inspection they become uncannily strange - ungraspable and impenetrable. The static immobile gaze of the 5x4" camera, not only turns its subjects into monuments, but, as when you stare at anything for too long, the space takes on an uncanny quality of otherness. Thus, it is not my locale that I photograph, but that of another. It is an alien world that is built within these photographs.
Chicken in a bun, 2010
Looked at from a distance, the landscape appears as a blank canvas on which histories are written. Hovering both above and outside, an omniscient vision of a totality, geography is a way of witnessing the lives of others by examining their spatial traces. Movements are tracked, land-use plotted, settlements monitored, society co-ordinated. However, the landscape at ‘ground-level’ becomes a scrutiny of everyday marks that are left as clues to histories that cannot be known. Thus, when one looks at familiar spaces up-close, one finds the traces of others are unfathomable. Signs of failure, dependency, longing, excess; all make demands on the recipient that cannot be fully met. All desperate signs of dissatisfaction in the face of desire, yet clues to lives that will never be known. There is a melancholic weight to such signals, they become obstacles to be navigated; best kept on the other side of the road. Hence the circular orbit. To maintain a distance.
This is both a documentary of the economic landscape, and a meditation on the psychological anxieties over occupation and vision. The two are not mutually exclusive.
